Beetlejuice the Musical closing soon in Melbourne

THE ghost with the most has less than a fortnight left on stage in Australia.

The two leads of Beetlejuice the Musical, Eddie Perfect (Beetlejuice) and Karis Oka (Lydia Deetz), visited Geelong earlier this week ahead of the production heading overseas next month.

Inspired by Tim Burton’s 1988 cult horror comedy film about life and death, the show had its first tryouts in Washington DC in 2019 before runs in Broadway, South Korea, Japan and Brazil, and opened at Melbourne’s Regent Theatre in May.

Perfect, who also wrote the music and lyrics, has only been playing the titular character since Beetlejuice opened in Australia, and did not compose with that in mind.

“The process of making the musical was so extraordinarily strange even by Broadway standards that we never really felt like we had a show with longevity on our hands,” he said.

“Once it became a success and it was going to go to Australia, I was like ‘Oh, I think I might be able to play the role’, but I would never have put my hand up to ask for it, because I’d be too scared that everyone I’ve worked with for the last five years would go ‘No’ and then I would be so embarrassed I’d never be able to talk to them again.

“But they asked me and I said yes and now I wish I’d written it differently, there’s nowhere to breathe, it’s really hard!”

Oka said the show had developed a cult following in Melbourne, with audiences coming from as far away as Perth and Malaysia and often seeing it more than once.

“There’s a lady that’s come once a week since it’s opened and she’s coming once a week until it closes.

“There are people who’ve come, I’d say, eight or nine times and they’re like ‘Oh, I’m coming four more times before closing and I’ll be there on closing night’.

“There’s really so much going on that people can come over and over again and just watch different characters, or literally just watch a different dancer doing a flip off a table and see something completely different.”

Beetlejuice the Musical will close here on September 11 and move to Abu Dhabi and Singapore.

“It’s pretty crazy and exciting and the show will get a new life there, but we’re really excited to close it out,” Oka said.

“No one knows how a musical is going to go in any particular territory,” Perfect added.

“Beetlejuice had a chequered beginning and found its audience, and then bringing it over here – it’s like ‘Well, how are Australians going to respond to it?’.

“And so the whole thing is kind of a bit of a big risk.

“So hopefully, it has more of a life, and we’re just going to see how it all goes after Melbourne.”

Perfect is even open to the idea of a sequel.

“I’m always emailing the writers going ‘Let’s write a sequel, let’s make a sequel!’ half jokingly,” he said.

“Before the Beetlejuice Beetlejuice movie came out [in 2024], we had heard that there are a few scripts for movie sequels that got written and then abandoned.”

Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian is the most famous of these – “That’s perfect, because we’d all get to go to Hawaii as research and write it off for tax,” Perfect quipped.

But Oka said she would prefer something akin to Death of a Salesman.

“I think there should be a sequel that’s like a really serious play with August: Osage County vibes, like it’s entirely serious, but it’s all the Beetlejuice characters.”

For more information, head to beetlejuicethemusical.com.au